He beat 40 other finalists, including Martin Sharp, Garry Shead and last year’s winner Ben Quilty, to take the 75,000 Australian dollar (US$77,972) prize for portraiture at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Mr. Storrier’s “Histrionic Wayfarer” is inspired by a 1519 Hieronymus Bosch painting called “The Wayfarer,” which is often interpreted as depicting a choice between vice and virtue.

“It’s a very modest, beautiful painting,” Mr. Storrier said. “I’ve always just enjoyed the dialogue in the picture, because it’s about a decision.”

Though there is no face to identify him, Mr. Storrier believes his identity is made clear by the figure’s clothes and equipment. He wears a pith helmet, sunglasses and backpack, and carries an eccentric array of items, including a palette, brushes, canvas and his dog Smudge. A sketch of Mr. Storrier’s face on a scrap of paper wafts by one corner of the 183 centimeter by 122 centimeter painting.

“John Singer Sargent said famously that a portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth,” Mr. Storrier said. “I thought well, I’ll try and avoid that. And I don’t particularly want to paint my own face. It’s as simple as that.”

While Bosch’s wayfarer has the appearance of a peasant, Mr. Storrier’s figure seems to have over-packed, hence “histrionic” in the title. He sees himself as a wayfarer only “mythically,” he added. “As you lie on the couch watching sport on TV, you dream of your other life.”

Mr. Storrier was born in Sydney in 1949 and now lives in the country town of Bathurst. He is known for his mysterious outback landscapes, his work often featuring scenes alight with glowing coals and flames. He has twice won the Sulman Prize, which runs concurrently with the Archibald and is awarded to the best subject or genre painting. He became the youngest artist to win the Sulman in 1968 when he was 19. He has exhibited widely in Australia as well as New York, London, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales include his work among their collections.

This isn’t the first time he has entered a portrait without a face into the Archibald. Last year, his painting “Moon Boy (Self-Portrait as a Young Man),” was hung as a finalist. It depicted a suit of empty clothes hanging as if on a scarecrow in a barren landscape. His “In Absentia” series features various invisible figures represented only by their clothes. When he started painting this year’s winner, it wasn’t initially with the Archibald in mind, he said. “It is part of a series I’ve done where none of them have faces. They are clothes, essentially, and accoutrements. It only occurred to me later in the day that it may be eligible.”

Mr. Storrier added that the Archibald Prize will need to be open to change if it’s going to remain relevant in a digital world. “One of the things that is going to change it is the extraordinary change in photographic media and how unbelievably intelligent cameras have become, in a way that makes photographic likenesses in paint seem rather redundant,” he said. “So I think painting as a form of expression, to be valid, has to continue to use imagination, which it’s extremely good at.”